Furious Excellence.

Rating: 9/10 (7 August 2013)

"Pacific Rim", directed by Guillermo del Toro, is a science fiction film that takes a long dormant genre, the Japanese Kaiju monster films of the 1950s and 1960s. They featured such creatures as Godzilla and a variety of others, del Toro not so much reinventing it but bringing it right back up to date. George Lucas' special effects company, Industrial Light & Magic, has created a world that is in the near-future but feels like tomorrow, the textures of the both the giant "jaegers" and monsters so realistic that even without 3D, you can feel that you can even touch them. The effects are simply put, outstanding and so far the best this year.
Yet del Toro, who directed the acclaimed Oscar-winning "Pan's Labyrinth" and the pair of "Hellboy" films, and his scriptwriter Travis Beacham, know that for the film to be more than merely "mecha vs. monsters", real characters need to be created and invested with real emotions. In interviews, del Toro said "We cannot pretend this is Ibsen", so the characters like Becket, Pentecost and Mori are strongly defined people who, through the equally powerful performances from Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba and Rinko Kikunchi give us a film where we care what happens and mean the final climactic sacrifices are actually poignant, as opposed to manufactured drama with little thought behind it.
Charlie Day and Burn Gorman, who play a pair of bantering scientists along with Ron Perlman, who is a black marketer in Hong Kong dealing in kaiju organs, are vividly sketched supporting characters who provide an antidote to the seriousness of the main plot. The humour isn't cynical or used to self-consciously comment on the film, but instead springs naturally from the characters. For a film with such a potentially risible concept and execution, it's a pleasant surprise to discover it to be so well written.
The art direction and design of the mechs and monsters is superb, as is the envisioning of Hong Kong, a strangely beautiful world of iridescent lights of all colours, like a pop art version of "Blade Runner". The cinematography of the Oscar winning Guillermo Navarro is excellent too, capturing the nuances of the oily, technical world the film lives in while also bringing out the colours for the maximum dramatic effect. The editing by Peter Amundson and John Gilroy in collaboration with del Toro wisely chooses to go for slower cuts, in particular in the many and frequent action scenes, so as to render them intelligible and to allow the audience not only to understand what is going on but also so that they know the geography of the situation.
The major flaw, apart from Ramin Djawadi's blandly generic score, is perhaps the action scenes themselves. Taken individually, each one is shot and edited very well, but by the end, there is a slight, creeping sense of audience fatigue. This is compounded by the fact that the film's most memorable scene is Kikuchi's flashback, which deals with the impact and aftermath of the monsters, rather than a long, extensive battle scene.
Despite this, taken as a whole, "Pacific Rim" is a whole lot of fun and easily the best summer blockbuster of the year. Oh, and stay through the credits: there is a nice little post-credits scene that deals with the fate of a certain character.